The Red Tree by Caitlin R. Kiernan

Caitlin R. Kiernan Goes Noirby dlovering

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September 19, 2009: While no one can fault Kiernan for atmosphere, language, or dramatic development, this book is a cross between Poe, Lovecraft and Brontë, with such blatantly lesbian themes that they dominate the story-telling.

Without giving away the punch-line, let it be said that the protagonist Sarah Crowe is a woman whose one-shot literary wonder creates a stultifying case of writer's-block. To transcend it, she leaves her comfortable apartment in Atlanta and begins a self-imposed author's retreat to an abandoned farm-house in Rhode Island.

The scene is fraught with both terror and nostalgia, for Sarah's one childhood memory of the area is tainted by tragedy, and it colors her perceptions from the very start. She finds a manuscript from the previous occupant, one Dr. Charles L. Harvey, a folklorist who (we come to learn much later) committed suicide by hanging from the boughs of the book's name-sake.

Sarah undertakes as her own mission an exploration of the dark despair and inward-turning delusions (or are they?) of the dead man, and sets out to write her own story. Clearly a depressive from the start, Sarah slips further and further into madness, intermixed with themes clearly drawn from de Lint and other authors.

Her lesbian romance with a local is the one bright component in the book, and it is so incongruous that it defies both reason and the normal rules of plot development. Sarah is rough, rude, gruff and generally unpleasant, while her companion is an exact opposite. Rather than allowing the mood of her friend to draw her away from the downward descent she has embarked upon, Sarah spoils her relationship and repels her one-time champion. From there the end of the story is telegraphed chapters before it comes to pass.

The mystery characters and the fantasy themes that Kiernan is so noted for are here little more than window-dressing. Gothic Romance aficionados might derive some small spark of enjoyment from the language and the mental erosion of the protagonist ("Turn of the Screw" anyone?), but the unhappy conclusion is both predictable and unsatisfying.

Suffice to say, purists of any genre will find this book sadly lacking and as a cross-over it doesn't make the grade . . . unless of course the reader is a suicidally-depressed lesbian, in which case this book is a road-map of sorts to a place no one else really wants to go.

While Caitlin R. Kiernan has sometimes been accused of resorting to formula her standard fare is both interesting, well-written and appealing. "The Red Tree" may be formulaic, but it is not her own brand and the difference is telling.

I Also Recommend: Moonheart, Rebecca, Turn of the Screw (A Norton Critical Edition), Jane Eyre (Norton Critical Edition), Alabaster.

A Tree with a Brooding Presence, a Novel with Teeth.by gargirl

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August 18, 2009: Don't be scared off by the cover, this is NOT a paranormal romance! This is a novel of eerie events and deep disquiet.

This latest excursion into the borderland between what is real and what is not is some of Caitlin Kiernan's finest work. Like the very best of her other novels, The Red Tree is the story of one woman's struggle to hold onto her sanity even as she loses her ability to tell facts from illusions.

Sarah Crowe is an author fleeing from a tradgedy that haunts her. She rents a remote farm in the hope that solitude will help her break through a terrible case of writer's block and get her back on track before she goes completely broke. In the farmhouse she finds a typewriter and a manuscript belonging to a previous tenant who was researching an ancient oak tree on the property prior to hanging himself from said tree. As she reads the manuscript, Sarah succumbs to the lure of the tree becoming obsessed with its history as her sanity wanes.

This is not a quiet little book. This is a book which had me turning over questions in my mind late at night, had me looking things up in other books and on wikipedia and left me questioning, long after the book was over, what was real and what was not.

Highly recommended.